Public health enjoyed a number of successes over the twentieth century. However, public health agencies have arguably been ill equipped to sustain these successes and address the complex threats we face today, including morbidity and mortality associated with persistent chronic diseases and emerging infectious diseases, in the context of flat funding and new and changing health care legislation...

Public health is what we do together as a society to ensure the conditions in which everyone can be healthy. Although many sectors play key roles, governmental public health is an essential component. Recent stressors on public health are driving many local governments to pioneer a new Public Health 3.0 model in which leaders serve as Chief Health Strategists, partnering across multiple sectors...

Leaders in public organizations are adopting many private sector management practices to control costs and increase efficiency. Nowhere is this more evident than among state health agencies. State health agencies were encouraged to change the way they operate by the 1988 Institute of Medicine (IOM) report on The Future of Public Health. This report portrayed public health as being in disarray. ...

We describe the service-for-prestige theory of leadership, which proposes that voluntary leader-follower relations evolved in humans via a process of reciprocal exchange that generated adaptive benefits for both leaders and followers. We propose that although leader-follower relations first emerged in the human lineage to solve problems related to information sharing and social coordination, th...

OBJECTIVE : The purpose of this study was to examine how nursing is viewed by the nation's decision makers and opinion leaders. BACKGROUND : Nurses comprise the largest subgroup of the health and healthcare workforce. The public recognizes nurses' contributions, consistently ranking them highest in honesty and ethics. Yet, significant barriers remain in nurses achieving substantial leadership...

This paper studies the impact of reservation for women on the performance of policy makers and on voters’ perceptions of this performance. Since the mid 1990’s, one third of Village Council head positions in India have been randomly reserved for a woman: In these councils only women could be elected to the position of chief. Village Councils are responsible for the provision of many local publi...

CONTEXT The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) is changing the landscape of health systems across the United States, as well as the functioning of governmental public health departments. As a result, local health departments are reevaluating their roles, objectives, and the services they provide. OBJECTIVE We gathered perspectives on the current and future impact of the ACA on g...

BACKGROUND Leadership is critical to making changes at multiple levels of the social ecological model, including the environmental and policy levels, and will therefore likely contribute to solutions to the obesity epidemic and other public health issues. The literature describing the relative leadership styles and strengths of women versus men is mixed and virtually all research comes from sec...